Yemeni Cites Cole Suspects Seen as Linked to bin Laden

By JOHN F. BURNS

Published: November 23, 2000

SANA, Yemen, Nov. 22—
Yemen's prime minister said today that the investigation into the attack on the American destroyer last month had identified the bombers as two Saudi citizens with Yemeni family roots who fought Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

The two men have personal profiles so closely parallel to that of Osama bin Laden, whom the Federal Bureau of Investigation is seeking on terror charges, that Yemeni investigators have repeatedly asserted their belief in Mr. bin Laden's indirect involvement. So far, though, they have no proof.

The Yemeni prime minister, Abdel Karim al-Iryani, said in a telephone interview that a group of Yemenis who helped carry out the Oct. 12 attack on the destroyer Cole, which killed 17 sailors, would go on trial as early as January in Aden, where the attack took place.

He also said many of these suspects were so-called Arab Afghans, a label widely used by Middle Eastern governments to refer to Arabs recruited to fight in Afghanistan in the 1980's. Thousands of such recruits were later transferred to Yemen and established Islamic terror groups linked to previous attacks on American targets.

If the Yemeni authorities try suspects in the Cole bombing, Yemen will be courting a major dispute with the F.B.I. It favors a wider-ranging pretrial inquiry into the possibility of high-level Yemeni involvement in the bombing.

Yemeni officials have said their investigations limit official Yemeni involvement in the bombing to about six Arab Afghans in low-level government posts in and around Aden. This group, investigators say, helped the bombers obtain false Yemeni identity documents, a four-wheel-drive vehicle, a boat, a large quantity of a plastic explosive usually used by the military, and three safe houses in Aden.

In the six weeks since the Cole attack, the F.B.I. has been engaged in a sometimes bitter tug of war with the Yemenis over the tight constraints imposed on F.B.I. agents by Yemen in the Cole inquiry. It has been two weeks since Mr. al-Iryani spoke of an imminent policy change that would allow broader rights to the F.B.I. here, including the right to monitor Yemeni interrogations through a two-way mirror or via a live video relay. But details are still being thrashed out.

This has left about 20 F.B.I. agents unable to nominate witnesses or suspects, or to talk to them. The Yemenis have instructed them that the inquiry will not ''ascend the ladder'' from the low-level Yemenis arrested so far to senior officials in Sana, the capital, who have had strong ties to Mr. bin Laden in the past.

Other Yemeni officials said today that blood tests being conducted in Yemen on the relatives of the two men thought to have carried out the bombing were intended to test an F.B.I. theory that at least one of the attackers may have been involved in the bombings of two American Embassies in East Africa in August 1998 Nearly 300 people, including 12 Americans, were killed in those attacks.

Mr. bin Laden has been in hiding in Afghanistan for several years. He has been indicted by a federal grand jury in Manhattan for his role in the embassy bombings, and the United States has offered a $5 million reward for his capture.

According to Yemeni officials, the effort to link the embassy bombings with the attack on the Cole hinges on matching the blood tests taken from Yemeni relatives of the suspected Cole attackers with samples of tissue and flesh found on the Cole after the bombing. Results would then be compared with DNA evidence gathered during the investigation of the embassy bombings.

F.B.I. officials said they had gathered ''confetti-sized'' human remains from the upper decks of the Cole. These were thought to be from the two men who pulled a fiberglass skiff alongside the warship and detonated a bomb.

Prime Minister al-Iryani, a 67-year-old Yale-educated biogeneticist, said Yemeni authorities had no proof now that Mr. bin Laden was involved in planning the Cole attack. But he noted that Mr. bin Laden came from a family that migrated to Saudi Arabia in the 1950's from the remote eastern Yemeni province of Hadhramaut, which borders Saudi Arabia.

Mr. al-Iryani said Yemeni investigators had determined that the two men who attacked the Cole were from Hadhramaut.

Other Yemeni officials identified one of the suspects in the bombing as Abdul Mohsen al-Taifi, a Saudi citizen, and said the F.B.I. considered him a suspect in the East Africa bombings. Prime Minister al-Iryani had said previously that the second suspect in the attack, who used the pseudonym Muhammad Ahmed al-Sharabi, also came from a Hadhramaut family.

Establishing that the Cole bombing was ordered, or at least inspired, by Mr. bin Laden would strengthen the F.B.I.'s theory that Mr. bin Laden is directly responsible for a succession of attacks on American targets. In a report on global terrorism it released earlier this year, the State Department said Mr. bin Laden's network -- known as al Qaeda, Arabic for ''the base'' -- has claimed, or been found, to have had a role in almost every major Middle East-inspired terrorist attack on Americans in the past decade.

The department said the bin Laden organization, financed by a family inheritance estimated at $300 million, botched three bombings in Aden in December 1992 that were aimed at American troops billeted there. There were no casualties among the Americans.

Yemeni officials and West European diplomats say that Mr. bin Laden was spotted in Sana in April 1998, two years after he had fled Saudi Arabia for Sudan and, later, Afghanistan.

It was also barely four months before the August 1998 American Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, barely three hours' flying time south of Yemen.

According to these accounts, Mr. bin Laden was spotted by Yemeni intelligence agents entering Sana and staying at the home of a powerful tribal leader, Sheik Mohammed bin-Shajieh, at that time regarded as one of Saudi Arabia's most powerful allies in Yemen.

One Yemeni official said that when Mr. bin Laden supposedly made the trip, he was already wanted by the United States for questioning in a string of terrorist attacks. He probably traveled on one of the small ships that ply a centuries-old trading route between the Makran region of western Pakistan and the southern coast of the Arabian Peninsula.

The report of Mr. bin Laden's trip to Sana could not be confirmed with F.B.I. officials, and Clinton administration officials have denied it. But if the trip occurred, it appears that Mr. bin Laden traveled about 1,350 miles to Yemen from his hiding place in Afghanistan without stumbling on any of the international tripwires set up to apprehend him.